ellineer

Vegetable news (First draft August ~13)

Broccoli seedlings not off to too good a start. I pulled up all but one row of the newest lettuce seedlings, because it’s been so hot until just recently and they are not growing. I cleaned the beds ups and sowed 1 1/2 rows of new broccoli seeds, a section of new carrot seeds, and a few more onion seeds around the other remaining onions. The pole beans are doing very well, they have more than topped their trellis, and we’ve had green bean crops three times now, about every 2-3 days. The cucumbers aren’t thriving though…they come up and flower, make a few cukes, and then they yellow and fall off. There is one gourd shaped cuke on the vine. Mystery failure…..The tomatoes are doing well, though we lost a few flowers when I accidentally shut off the watering system for a few days ( did I mention it was hot?). The smaller tomatoes are prolific, though none red yet. The Oregon Spring lost more flowers, but the remaining tomatoes are turning red. We’ve had two and they were very good- flavor you don’t get from the store

Summer vegetable garden

Broccoli sprouts coming up, about six of them, I almost forgot I’d sown them because they look like radish sprouts, almost pulled ’em up. They took about ten days to sprout. Carrots getting large, they are very sweet. Green Onions also getting substantial. Pole beans have reached the top of they trellis. Cucumbers flowering already, three on one, I’m trying to train them up the trellis first before they ‘trail’, because they are a “bush cucumber”, not the regular climbing vine type.

The real news is that the tomatoes finally look fantastic! Lots of flowers on both kinds, the larger Oregon Spring and the small Sweet Cassidy ones. The latter is indeterminate and is about 4 feet tall now, finally started forming flower buds before we went out of town. Ten days later they are blooming! We set up a great watering system with drips in the tomato containers and mini-‘sprayers’ in each of the raised boxes. We keep the whole thing under stiff green netting while gone, but I can’t keep the tomatoes in that anymore, they won’t form well and may get diseased. Now if we can somehow kee the deer off of them,,,,,

The main planter box is still in netting. 4 New (some partial) rows of butter lettuce finally sprouting new leaves….I made sure to thin them out so I don’t eat the cramped plants that won’t leaf out key last time. They like the sunny 70’s weather we’re having now much better than the 80’s and 90’s of June.

Pole beans:

Bush Cucumbers:

Determinate tomato Oregon Spring (already has 2 big green tomatoes and a bunch of small ones):

Indeterminate Tomato Sweet Cassady:

Vegetable garden, summer edition

Took all the old lettuce out last couple of weeks- since they were spaced pretty closely to begin with and the stalks continued to grow stout while I was harvesting outer leaves, they eventually ended up too crowded to grow new leaves. The stalks also grew tall, but the leaves were short and not as good. The new seedlings just got their second set of leaves. This time no spinach, it just bolted early, and the lettuce is spaced out a little.

Have been getting great nasturtium flowers for vitamin C, plus great peppery flavor. I had six sites in the planter bed, so I took most of them out before we go out of town for a while, also to let the adjacent carrots and onions get some sun, leaving two plants. They are very floriferous. I always eat a bouquet full of flowers. When I cleaned out the planters, I made a great salad of all the nasturtium flowers and buds I’d taken out, a fat carrot, two small onions and some olive oil vinaigrette. Yum.

Sowed broccoli seeds where the nasturtiums were, 4 sites, all along the west side. Broccoli is supposed to be sown in mid summer. Right now in my garden there are two different rows sowings of carrots and two of onions, each type with some ripe or ripening vegetables. The carrots are larger than last year, much fatter. The green onions are new for me, but so far I have been using the thinned out ones and they are very tasty. The 5 green beans plants now have several sets of leaves each, and are about 6″ tall, still not yet sending aerials to the trellis. Also two cucumbers about 3″ tall, a “bush” variety that I’m hopioto train on the trellis, I accidentally bought the wrong variety.

The tomatoes had an iffy start, what with leaf curl and all, but no spots or brown discoloration. It turns out to be due to overwatering one of them. The wart like spots on the Sweet Cassidy miniature tomato stem looked like some kind of fungus, but it is due to root initials or starts. They recommended mounding some dirt n them and they will form roots to make the plant stronger, which they did. It finally took off, and is now three feet tall with dozens of flower buds forming, more all the time, and growing quickly. It is an indeterminate plant, so we got three plastic rods to place inside the existing cage and extend it higher for more growth. It took a long time before it showed flowers, which the indeterminate do….they grow first. I gave them flowering fertilizer, but it still took a while. Several hot sunny days helped. The determinant plant, Oregon Spring, started flowering almost right away.

Video Tour of the Back Yard!!

We increased our upload bandwidth to 30 (30/30) yesterday for my work connection, and it’s letting me upload larger files. Next entry will be the older video tours from earlier in the season, if it lets me, since they show different flowers (also, those tours of the front and back yard are narrated, for better or worse. I’ll have to do another in the late summer or even soon, since the foliage is getting so lush, giving it a different look

Other pix of plants in bloom: Golden Columbine, Penstemon, White Brodiaea, Mock Orange, etc. Also, a bouquet of our wild flowers for guests.

Take a video tour of the front yard!

Take a few minutes to see the front yard /rock garden, much of which was recently revised (the actual ‘garden’ is in the back. The backyard video will have to be downloaded separately, WordPress is not allowing it right now).

Dave put in the stone path lining and retaining wall features over the winter, and also recontoured the hill, leveled the terrace, and put a nice capstone on the existing concrete retaining wall so it blends in. A big swath of the rock garden area was dug out about 1 1/2 feet deep, then filled with smaller gravel, peat, soil and larger gravel, to make it a true rock garden habitat so some of the more challenging desert plants could thrive. This area gets all day sun, which is why we wanted to level a terrace for vegetable garden boxes there. You can see four lighter colored petrified wood structures in the rock garden – those are take from the garage of our house at Lopez, the original builder obtained them in the 1960’s, and they are embedded in the gravel area. Many of the plants put around it are small right now, but next year they’ll be more color there: lavender monardellas, yellow desert daisies, orange Indian paintbrush, Lewisia tweedyi, yellow gaillardias and balsam root, pink hookers onions, bluebells, dark purple Setosa iris and pink pussy toes as well as a few others…..

A few pix of the current garden, still getting salads every few days. Now with onions and carrots, and a few nasturtium flowers for color!

Dave erected a temporary “fence”, made of two green support rods and stiff green plastic honeycomb netting. He fashioned wire hooks on the rods and sewed the three sides of the netting along the bottom with green plastic coated wire. Each panel can be unhooked and lowered separately to access the plants, but preventing the deer from getting in. They might poke their heads a little into it, but the netting could be sharp against their faces, and all they’d get is nasturtiums and onions, which they don’t like. The lettuce and hopefully the green beans and cucumbers will be relatively safe from the deer. The tomatoes aren’t protected, yet.

Bird Zen – ducks diving

1 1/2 minute

Bird Zen (35 second video-Bushtits’ zen – test)

Tomatoes!

Had to wait until the end of May according to the experts, so I wouldn’t get “flower drop” and lose all the potential fruit to our labile weather like last year. But we chose two varieties which tolerate cold, anyway, so maybe plant earlier next year. These are Sweet Casady (sweet small heirloom type, indeterminate) and Oregon Spring, (a determinate early fruiting one). Now we just have to hope the deer don’t find them! I may put the dilute pepper spray on them, but it seems futile since it will get washed off with the frequent watering I do. Baseline pics of the ‘maters and early cucumber shoots. No beans yet, so I planted some more recently.